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How Children Fail

By John Holt

Why do they fail? Because they are afraid, bored, and confused.

The true test of intelligence is not how much we know to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.

The intelligent people, young or old, meeting a new situation or problem, open himself up to it; he tries to take in with mind and senses everything he can about it; he think about it; instead of about himself or what it might cause to happen to him; he grapples with it boldly, imaginatively, resourcefully, and if not confidently at least hopefully; if he fails to master it, he looks without shame or fear at his mistakes and learns from them. This is intelligence. Clearly, its roots lie in a certain feeling about life, and one’s self respect to life.

The bright child is curious about life and reality, eager to get in touch with it, embrace it, unite himself with it. There is no wall, no barrier between him and life.

We destroy children learning capacity by making them afraid, afraid of not doing what other people want, of not pleasing, of making mistake, of failing, of being wrong.

We destroy the disinterested (NOT uninterested) love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards --- gold star, or paper marked 100 and tacked to wall, or A’s on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean’s list – in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.

We encourage them to feel that the end and aim of all they do in school is nothing more than to get a good mark on a test, or to impress someone with what they seem to know. We kill, not only their curiosity, but their feeling that it is a good and admirable thing to be curious, so that by the age of ten most of them will not ask questions, and will show a good deal of scorn for the few who do

School tends to be a dishonest as well as nervous place. We adults are not often honest with children, least of all in school. We tell them, not what we think, but what we feel they ought to think; or what other people feel or tell us they ought to think.

School should be a place where children learn what they most want to know, instead of what we think they ought to learn. The child who wants to know something remembers it and uses it once he has it; the child who learns something to please or appease someone else forgets it when the need for pleasing or the danger of not appeasing is past.

The only difference between bad and good students in this respect is that the bad students forget right away, while the good students are careful to wait until after the exam.

If for no other reason, we could well afford to throw out most of what we teach in school because the children throw out almost all of it anyway.

Think things, not words --- O.W. Holmes, JR

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